The name of my partner-in-crime is beside the point, and since I doubt her husband knows what she’s been up to and won’t relish her being associated with me and my crimes, I’ll call her Constance in this document, after Lady Chatterley. (You’ll allow that little joke, I hope. And no, I’m not a great reader of the classics. I saw the movie once – Fi’s choice.)
‘I thought I’d drop by,’ she said that evening at the door, with the unmistakable air of goods being offered. She seemed very drunk, but it could have been the exhilaration of being the initiator, an aphrodisiac in itself, as men have known for millennia. ‘You said you’d show me the inside of your playhouse, remember?’
‘Did I? I’m not sure there’s anything to see,’ I said, grinning.
She waggled her iPhone. ‘Can I take a photo to show my carpenter?’
‘My carpenter?’ I teased. ‘Well, you can, yes, but you do know you can just buy these things flat-packed at B&Q? All I did was fix it together and then build the slide.’
‘But the slide is the best bit,’ she exclaimed. ‘Maybe I’ll try it out – if my bum doesn’t get stuck.’
What was that if not an invitation to look?
She was wearing a white cotton dress, puffed at the shoulders and gathered under her breasts with a tie, the fabric so light it caught on her thighs every time she took a step.
‘Any chance of a glass of wine?’ she asked as we passed through the kitchen.
You know, it’s not true that in moments of sexual temptation men degenerate into lower mammals, all rational thought obliterated. It’s more a weakening by degrees. First, when I noticed the dress riding up, I thought, Don’t even think about it. No way. Then, when I was opening the wine, I thought, Well, you had to crack some time. Soon after, as I was leading her down the garden path (that sounds bad), I thought, Come on, at least not here, not with your children sleeping inside. Then: All right, just this one time and then never again.
By which time we were inside the playhouse, door closed, and she was pressing the full length of herself against me: her body was overheated, her hair humid, her face on fire. It was the heat that did it, not the softness or pertness or wetness, not the scent of sweat or Chanel or wine. There’s such an urgency to hot skin, the nearness of the other person’s blood, your own responds as if it’s magnetized.
It tells you what’s on offer is worth it.
It tells you it’s worth everything you own. Everything you love.
Okay, so maybe all rational thought is obliterated.
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:17:36
No, I don’t want to tell you her name. It’s a question of sparing feelings, isn’t it? These namings and shamings rarely damage the individual alone; people have families, loved ones who get caught in the crossfire. And, in the end, it really doesn’t matter. She could have worn a mask and I would have felt the same: that’s the truth. I didn’t address her directly, not a word. I left them to scuffle to their feet and waited for him in the living room. I put the TV on so I couldn’t follow the guilty whispers of her departure, but as soon as I heard the front door close I turned it off again.
His voice reached me even before the handle turned on the living room door: ‘Fi, I don’t—’
I spun, ready, cutting him off: ‘Save your breath, Bram. I know what I saw and I’m not interested in discussing it. This is where it ends. I want you to leave.’
‘What?’ He stood stranded in the doorway, trying to laugh off the strike, two parts bravado, one part fear. His hair was dishevelled and damp at the temples and he still had the flushed skin, the odd vulnerability, of a man interrupted during sex.
‘I want to separate. Our marriage is over.’
I could see from his face, his struggle to find the right reaction, that my tone of dead conviction was more unsettling than the hysteria he’d expected.
‘You thought I’d left the boys, didn’t you?’ he said.
I knew him inside out and I knew that in times of confrontation his technique was not to plead his case but to try to alter the emphasis of mine, in doing so undermining the central crime.
‘You really thought I would just leave the house and not be here if they needed me?’
This was slick even by his standards: I was in the wrong for unjustly suspecting him of neglect. Not even voiced, either; thoughtcrime. ‘You did leave the house,’ I pointed out.
‘Not the premises, though.’
‘No, you’re right. Let’s put it in perspective: what you were doing was no different from taking out the bins or doing a bit of weeding.’
He raised his eyebrows, as if sarcasm had no place in this discussion, as if he were in a position to take the moral high ground. But his fingers strayed to his lips as they did when he was uncertain.
‘Go and stay at your mum’s,’ I said coldly. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow and work out when you can see the boys over the school holidays.’
‘The school holidays?’ He was taken aback, as if he’d assumed any expulsion was no more than a timeout, a temporary cooling-off in the sin bin.
‘If you prefer, I’ll take them and go to Mum and Dad’s, but I think you’ll agree it’s less disruptive if you leave and we stay.’
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ Committed now to a show of cooperation, he hastened upstairs to gather a few things. There was a brief lull in activity that I knew must be his lingering at the boys’ doors, looking in on them before he left, and this caused a small tearing sensation inside me.
‘Fi?’ He was back in the doorway, a holdall at his feet, but I didn’t make eye contact.
‘I don’t want to hear it, Bram.’
‘No, please,’ he begged, ‘I just need to say one thing.’
I sighed, raised my gaze. What one thing could he possibly say? A hypnotist’s spell to erase my short-term memory?
‘Whatever I’ve done as a husband, I’m not that person as a father. I’ll do whatever you want to make this okay for the boys. To stay in their lives.’
I nodded, not unmoved.
He left then. He left with the air of a man who noticed that the ledge beneath his feet was crumbling only at the point of its giving way completely.
VictimFi
@Emmashannock72 If my husband did that I’d f**king castrate him!
@crime_addict Should have taken him to the cleaners then and there, love.
5
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:21:25
You heard right: I said twice. He’d been unfaithful to me before.
Which doesn’t mean we’d never been happy because we were, I swear we were, for years. We were inseparable at the beginning, there was none of that keeping each other in compartments until we were sure. It was a physical attraction, yes, but a mental one too, a genuine fascination with a different kind of lifeform. I was quiet on the outside but confident inside, he was noisy to the world but to himself, I don’t know what . . . Lost, I’d say, maybe even empty. I suppose I wanted to fill him. When we got married, I thought I’d done the impossible, settled down with a man who was never going to settle down – until he met me, of course.
Okay, so I took my eye off the ball when the house needed attention, and then there were the kids, but so does everyone at that life stage. Dropped balls were rolling into the street the length of Trinity Avenue, you just got used to stepping over them.
Then, a few years ago, he slept with a colleague at a work team-building event. There was an overnight hotel stay, a free bar, a what-happens-in-Vegas mood: the usual clichés. I saw texts from her that made it impossible to deny, even for a man like Bram, who is pretty good at thinking on his feet.
I was at home with the boys while this ‘team building’ was going on. They were young then, maybe four and five, as much of a handful as you’d imagine, even without my work and other pressures. It was a despicable betrayal, yes, but despicable in a familiar, classic way, and whatever people say there is a certain solace in knowing others have felt the same pain.
‘Don’t
tell anyone else what he did,’ I remember Alison saying, when I confided in her and Merle that I’d decided to forgive him (not quite the right word, but for the sake of argument that’s the one I’ll use). ‘It will change how people react to you far more than how they react to him.’
This was advice I’d have done well to follow, for even as I shared my distress with Polly, I knew it was an error. Naturally resistant to Bram’s charms from the start, she now had evidence to prove her intuition, evidence she was not willing to excuse even when I did. And just as Alison had predicted, Polly instinctively found fault with me. ‘You can’t be attracted to someone so obviously, well, you know, and not expect other people to be attracted to him as well,’ she said.
‘So obviously what?’
‘Sexy, Fi. And restless, you know, in that edgy way.’
‘Is that how everyone else sees him?’
‘Of course they do. He’s a type. A bad boy. However hard he tries, he can never be fully rehabilitated.’
‘That’s stereotypical nonsense,’ I said.
As was the conversation I had with Bram himself.
‘I don’t know if I can ever trust you again,’ I told him.
‘Try,’ he begged. ‘It will never happen again, you have to believe that.’
Trying, trusting, believing: a thousand times more appealing than the alternative when you share two young children. And he was faithful after that, I’m certain he was – until that evening last July.
Was I faithful to him? Very funny. Of course I was. I refer you to the two small children. Even if I’d had the desire to stray – which I didn’t – well, I didn’t have the time.
And no, Polly isn’t married.
Bram, Word document
If you haven’t been told already then you will soon: there had been a prior extramarital lapse. I won’t dwell on that here, because as I say this isn’t about the sex. Love and fidelity are not the same thing, whatever women say. (Again, there’s no need for names. She was a girl at a work event, a one-night thing. She left the company soon after.)
Why did I cheat on the woman I love? The best way I can explain it is that it was not an addiction or even an itch, but more like the memory of hunger after years of good eating. The belief that I was better when I was desperate, my senses sharper, pleasure more intensely taken. A kind of egomaniac’s nostalgia.
I won’t go on. I have no doubt you’re already rolling your eyes. You’ll show your colleague that last bit and you’ll say, ‘I’ve heard it all now.’
‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:24:41
By the way, don’t think I don’t know that after that fling with the girl at work Polly called him ‘Wham Bram Thank You Ma’am’.
Pretty clever, I have to admit.
What she called him after the playhouse incident is too shocking for broadcast.
Bram, Word document
When the boys were little and Fi was on the warpath, we used to call her Fee Fi Fo Fum. Affectionately, of course, though it became less so on my part once I’d realized that nine times out of ten the Englishman’s blood she smelled was mine.
6
Friday, 13 January 2017
London, 1 p.m.
The number you have dialled is no longer in service.
‘Any luck?’ Lucy Vaughan asks her.
‘No.’ She needs to get rid of this woman with her fake emails and fantasies about owning someone else’s home. Should she call the police straight away? Or wait till she’s located Bram, so they can tackle this outrageous invasion together? And now that so much of the Vaughans’ furniture is installed, do they qualify for squatters’ rights? Are they, technically, occupiers?
The questions have no answers. They feel as unreal as the images in front of her eyes. The whole experience is hallucinatory, not to be trusted.
She tries Bram a second time. A third.
The number you have dialled is no longer in service.
She can’t even leave him a voicemail. ‘Where the hell is he?’
Lucy watches, her own phone in her hand. ‘You have two children, don’t you? Could he be with them?’
‘No, they’re in school.’ How does Lucy know things about her when she didn’t know Lucy even existed until a few minutes ago?
Mum, she thinks. She’ll ask her to pick up the boys from school and take them back to her place. They can’t come here, they’d be distraught to find their bedrooms gutted, their precious possessions spirited away.
Spirited away where? Owning the house might be this stranger’s delusion (she continues to cling to the notion of a practical joke), but its rightful contents are starkly, incontrovertibly missing. Someone has physically removed them.
This is when it occurs – not a thought so much as an unleashing, a surge of foreboding that breaks into consciousness in the form of full-blown terror: if her property could vanish during her two-day absence, could her children? ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Please, no, please . . .’ With trembling hands, she scrolls through her phone contacts.
‘What is it?’ Lucy asks, agitated. ‘What’s happened? Who are you calling?’
‘My children’s school. I have to— Oh, Mrs Emery! This is Fi Lawson. My son Harry is in Year Three and Leo in Year Four.’
‘Of course, how are you, Mrs—’ begins the school secretary, but Fi interrupts.
‘I need you to check on them for me – urgently.’
‘Check on them? I’m not sure I understand.’
‘Can you just make sure they’re where they should be? In their classrooms or the playground, wherever. It’s really important.’
Mrs Emery hesitates. ‘Well, Year Four will be in the lunch hall, I think—’
‘Please!’ Stronger than a wail: a shriek, offensive enough to cause Lucy to flinch. ‘I don’t care where it is, just check they’re there!’
There’s a shocked pause, then, ‘Would you mind holding a moment . . .?’
Fi strains to follow a background exchange between Mrs Emery and a colleague, ten or so agonizing seconds of low-voiced back and forth, and then Mrs Emery comes back on the line. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lawson, but I’ve just been told your boys aren’t actually here.’
‘What?’ Instantly, a terrible smacking starts up in her ribcage and her stomach threatens to empty itself.
‘They’re not in school today.’
‘Where are they then?’
‘Well, with their father, as far as we’re aware. Look, I’m going to put you through to the head . . .’
She is shaking now, the convulsions out of rhythm with the heart-smacking. She is a machine that has lost control of its functions.
‘Mrs Lawson? Sarah Bottomley here. I can assure you there’s absolutely nothing for you to worry about.’ The head teacher of Alder Rise Primary has a bracing manner, confident of order at all times, with just the subtlest sense of offence at Fi’s current suggestion of disorder. ‘Your husband requested permission to take the boys out of school for the day and I agreed to give it. Their absence is fully authorized.’
‘Why?’ Fi cries. ‘Why did he take them out of school? And why would you agree to that?’
‘Pupils are taken out of school for all sorts of reasons. In this case, it was to do with pick-up being difficult, what with neither of you being in London today.’
Neither of you? Bram was supposed to be here, in this house, two streets from the school! ‘No, no, that’s wrong. I’ve been away, but Bram has been working from home.’
The home that continues to be stocked with a stranger’s belongings.
‘Is there a chance you might have got your dates muddled?’ Mrs Bottomley suggests. ‘When I spoke with your husband a few days ago, I got the impression you knew all about the request.’
‘I knew nothing. Nothing.’ This is followed by a ghastly animal wail and it is only when Lucy takes the phone from her that Fi understands she has become too unmanageable to be allowed to continue.
‘Hello?’ Lucy says. ‘I’m a friend
of Mrs Lawson’s. Of course, yes, leave this with us, we’ll try to track down the boys’ father. I’m sure it’s just a case of crossed wires and the children are quite safe. Mrs Lawson has had a bit of a shock and isn’t herself. Yes, we’ll let you know as soon as we locate them.’
As the call ends, Fi attempts to seize back her phone, but Lucy resists. ‘Would it be best if I tried your husband for you?’ she asks mildly.
‘No, it wouldn’t. This is nothing to do with you,’ Fi snaps. ‘You shouldn’t be here! Give me my phone and get out of my house!’
‘I really think you should sit down and take a deep breath.’ As Lucy pulls out a chair for her at the kitchen table, the dynamic is one of patient–nurse. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘I don’t want tea, for God’s sake!’ Her phone returned to her, Fi tries Bram again – The number you have dialled is no longer in service – before placing it face down on the table. Something horrific is taking place, she thinks. Knows. Knows in her bones. This confusion with the house, this brazen Lucy woman, is only a part of it: something has happened to Bram and the boys. Something very bad.
And in that instant, her waking nightmare becomes something so terrifying it has no name.
Geneva, 2 p.m.
Already he hates the room. Hates the hotel. Hates what little he’s seen and heard of this city. A plane screams in from the east, more ear-splitting than the rest, and he braces himself for shattered glass. Maybe that’s what it’s going to take, he thinks, to allow his disaster to shrink. Something as earth-shattering – literally – as a plane crash.
It’s not the first time today he’s thought like this. When his own plane approached the city that morning, he had had the distinct idea that it wouldn’t matter if the landing gear failed, if the belly of the thing split open on the tarmac and spilled him from its wounds. He would not have objected to dying that way. Despicably, given the two hundred fellow passengers he was prepared to take with him, he prayed for it.
Our House Page 3